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Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:05] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Season two of the Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers in midlife.
[00:00:12] Patsy Day: Hi, Susannah.
[00:00:12] Susannah de Jager: Hi Pats.
[00:00:14] Patsy Day: How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:15] Susannah de Jager: It's been so interesting diving into the world of our next guest, Salima Saxton. The trails and tribulations of reentering childhood domains as an adult, such as the schoolyard. I didn't always love school and had moments of actually being quite badly bullied. I was that child that sort of knew what I ought to say to fit in, but I could never bring myself to say it. Even though the rejection and feeling of not fitting in still ate at me.
Last year, I took a memoiring course and I wrote about some of these experiences and what was so interesting was that when I finished, the other people on the course asked me, and would you change how you behaved? Would you tell your previous self to fit in? And the answer was no. I wouldn't.
Life is long and finding your people requires you to be you. If you're trying to be someone else, you're not going to be able to move forward. Your values, your value, your happiness will all be subjugated to try and guess what others want from you and it was so interesting having that question posed. Because it was so liberating. I realized that as unhappy as some of these memories were, my bluntness, my inability to play the game, and sticking to my principles were in fact a superpower. They allowed me to be me.
Salima's story is one of having her own identity, and then having to reconnect with it. It's so recognizable, and whilst, quite sad to hear at times, hugely validating to anyone who might feel a bit lost, confused, or somehow sucked back into games we thought we had outgrown. And Pats, how's your wobbly middle?
[00:02:04] Patsy Day: I've been feeling a little flat over the last couple of weeks. I suppose we can't function at a highly motivated level all the time. I'm sure it'll pass. A few years ago, a close friend pointed out that usually when I'm feeling this way, it's because I'm not reading very much, and that's probably true for now. So I'm going to prescribe myself some good summer reads.
[00:02:30] Susannah de Jager: That sounds very sensible.
[00:02:31] Patsy Day: Okay. Tell us about today's guest.
[00:02:33] Susannah de Jager: Salima Saxon is a multihyphenate powerhouse, a slashy in the words of Derek Zoolander. An actress slash writer slash podcaster slash voiceover artist slash mother slash wife slash something else I'm sure I'm forgetting. But for a while she stepped back from many of these identities to focus on being a mother.
The children were and are wonderful, but the school gate politics and performative friendships left her feeling disconnected from herself. After an intervention by a really good friend, we all need those, Salima began the hard work of reclaiming the parts of herself. She'd left behind.
In today's conversation, we talk to Salima about what it means to emerge from those kinds of life altering events and what she's taking from them into this next stage of her career and life.
Salima, thank you so much for joining today.
[00:03:28] Salima Saxton: My pleasure.
[00:03:29] Susannah de Jager: I can't wait to dive into all the motherland nightmare scapes that you speak so evocatively about. But before we do, I just want to hear about the you before you became a mother. The you that knew you, without thinking about it.
[00:03:47] Salima Saxton: Susannah, actually, I was always going to be a lawyer, or so my mother thought,and then I kind of went left field when I graduated from university and became an actor, and my first job was for the Unicorn Children's Theater Company where I played a tiger, an Indian princess, and a fairy, and my mother basically came and sobbed. But I think I became an actor in my twenties because I was someone who really needed to play. I'd been a really serious kid for various reasons. I was very academic. I was what I think they call a parentified child. There was a need in my home for me to behave a bit like a parent, even as a child. Mainly because my father was an alcoholic, a tricky individual, and I was very much a good girl. I was head girl. I was a girl guide. I had piano lessons.Everything was about being good and doing it to my utmost, but it wasn't a lot of fun.
And in fact, when I had children, I really realized that I hadn't played much as a child. I think in my twenties there was an instinct that kicked in, unbeknownst to me that I needed to access a different part of me, and that was to learn to be joyful, to be free, and to play and to not feel I had to control the whole world around me. That was something that I very much felt as a child always. That I was the one who had to control everything. Obviously I couldn't. But even to the point that when we would go on, summer holidays, I would remember, how to get back to the car on the ferry. Like I would draw a map back when I was like eight or nine because I thought I ought to do that.
So my twenties were a really, really important medicine for me, where I worked mainly in television, but also did theater and I had some really joyful free times.
I love Jam and Jerusalem. It was such a special show and it was just that very rare show that is really special British TV, a bit like The Detectorists.
It was the most incredible cast to be around because Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Maggie Steed, David Mitchell.So many incredible actors. I learned so much from them, not just even about acting actually. But, I learned so many human things from that cast of people, and I'm always attracted to comedians generally. I've married a man who's very funny and that was one of my, like prerequisites sexually. Marry a man that is very funny, that can dance, and that can sing. Oh and that can cook.
[00:06:44] Susannah de Jager: Good looking, great father, good in bed. I mean, it's just not that much to ask.
[00:06:50] Salima Saxton: No, exactly. But definitely marry a funny man, that's like my big advice to anybody. If you want stay married, you've got to be able to find things funny. But I have a real soft spot for comedians generally, or people with a great sense of humor, and I often find that a cleverest person in the room is the funniest and that cast of Jam and Jerusalem, there were some of the cleverest people. I've stayed in touch with Jennifer and Dawn actually, and they're really kind, wonderful, nurturing brilliant women. Yeah, I'm really proud of those series.
[00:07:23] Patsy Day: Going back to you saying that you had to learn how to be joyful. You had to learn those attributes. And adaptability is an interesting thing because, you know, you learned and were adaptable, but then that seems to have worked against you when you were in a less supportive environment. For example, the school gate that you've spoken about.
[00:07:46] Salima Saxton: I have to be responsible for that myself.
When you become a mum, or when I became a mother, I totally lost sight of who I was for quite a long time, and so I happened to want to be at home and I was privileged enough to be able to be at home with them in those early years.
But I think I slightly lost my mind in that I really didn't know who I was or what I was doing. So I've reached a conclusion now that I befriended people who weren't right for me at various points in my thirties. But I had to kind of own up to that, and say. That's on me. I wasn't really showing me wholly. I wasn't really sure who I was.
It's interesting being in my forties now because I really feel like I've come home to myself and come back to myself in terms of female friendships in particular. A lot of my teen and 20 something friendships have been strengthened in the last few years and some newer friendships. But I think that's a lot to do with me feeling like I can show up as me as a quite an unedited me.
So I say to friends now having babies.
One, give birth however you want. Don't listen to anybody. Two, breastfeed, don't breastfeed, who cares? It's totally up to you. Three, lean on the people that know you really well. Obviously you can make some brilliant friendships, but like, take your time. It took me a long time to come back to myself after having, three in relatively quick succession.
I wasn't a woman that kind of just snapped back to me as Salima. I became somebody very different actually.
[00:09:38] Susannah de Jager: We are very poorly prepared for these moments, psychologically. People don't necessarily say, it's going to feel like this. You'll undoubtedly have these moments where you barely know who you are, because guess what? You stop being that person and you, from an evolutionary perspective, have to shift into being this nurturing biological pull. You are different, and you need to be.
I do think that there is more preparation that people could be given. Because the danger in the absence of it is that we fall into all sorts of defaults. They might be things we saw our parents doing, they might be in reaction to what we saw our parents doing, but they're not necessarily chosen.
When you come to what we do with The Wobbly Middle, and take that analogy on, we are very much there saying similar things. Which is, you'll go through these transitions, you might give up work, you then want to reenter. How can we help people move through those phases in a way that will still be bumpy, but where they can feel a little bit less alone?
[00:10:40] Salima Saxton: Absolutely that. You know, so I'm half Pakistani and how Pakistanis look at women having babies is very different. I really think about the word mother,and I'd like to say as well, you know, one can be a mother in lots of different ways.
I've got friends who are actively choosing not to have biological children, and they are mothering in other aspects of their lives. The word mother needs to be expanded beyond just the biological offspring one can have. One can be a totally satisfied, complete, joyful woman being part of different kinds of family structures. I could have been equally happy not having children and not being married. I would give anything for my children and my husband, I know, and I'm very blessed. But I've reached a point now where I think, yeah, I could have also have done this life very differently.
So I always want to say that out loud as well. But if one is mothering in whatever sense that is, and also has a profession, maybe has a partner, I don't know, doing other things, life is then by it's very definition, it has to be messy. If you're going to fit all of that in. And I strove, for years in my early years of motherhood for balance, but I think balance is very overrated, and I actually think it's a bit of a poison chalice to say to women, seek out balance. I say, no.
If you want to do something really big, I happen to want to do some big things, then it's going to have to be a bit messy. It's going to have to be fish fingers and waffles for supper sometimes. I'm going to be late for parents' evening. But that's cause I'm writing manically to deadline or that's cause I'm voicing an audio book.
So I want a lot from my life. I'm quite greedy and I'm happy to say that now. Whereas in those early years of motherhood, I did think it was very much about intricate plats and buying vintage liberty print dresses and kind of me going look, here are my immaculate offspring, and actually I've learned that as they've got older, they're now 16, 13, and 10. I have very opinionated kids. I have kids who are not necessarily polite at all times and I've had to become more humble about who my offspring are. They are not a reflection on me. They are them.
You said earlier that it took you a while to go back to yourself.
[00:13:29] Patsy Day: How did you find your way back to yourself?
[00:13:32] Salima Saxton: Writing. I was always a bookworm and I always wrote little stories and things, and being actor is obviously telling stories is being a storyteller. So, writing and acting are obviously very linked.
So I was always a kid who felt very close to words, and I've always loved words hugely. I'm a chatterbox.
I always secretly wanted to write a book. But I didn't have the confidence to say that out loud, or to be that person. So I took a course, a Faber & Faber course when my kids were tiny. I was getting some good feedback about it, so I started writing.
I wrote a novel and I got a literary agent. I can't talk about all that's about to come, but some great things have happened and my writing career has progressed further. But I really seek comfort and I work things out by telling stories. True stories or made up stories. That's how I get to the bottom of things.
[00:14:38] Susannah de Jager: I think that a lot of people will resonate with that.
It can be hugely helpful in the way that you have just described at sort of reconciling or realizing, what's going on? How to come back to yourself.
[00:14:52] Salima Saxton: And also dreams. You're literally putting your dreams down on paper. Whatever you are writing is crystallizing. I don't feel comfortable with terms like manifesting. That's my own issue. But you know, it's all the same stuff, isn't it? It's all just dressed up in different words.
Some people are happy to call it manifesting. I'm happy to say it's telling a story and feeling where you are comfortable, who are you in that story? Where are you a heroine in that story? It's still like putting energy into working out where your life is being directed. I work as a coach as well and I use that a lot in coaching in terms of what is your story going to be? And it's just lets people dream. We don't often give ourselves enough time to dream, do we? I don't know about you two, but I don't.
[00:15:44] Patsy Day: I think people are also scared of saying things aloud. I think if you write, you can practice saying those things to yourself, and I think it's good to share your dreams with your close friends who will see your ability in you and when you say them aloud, your close friends don't say, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
They're like, sure, I can see that and then the next step is also to be aware that as you do share things or as you do try things out, you're going to be met with nos. Coming to terms with people saying no. Understanding that somebody saying no to you is completely normal.
[00:16:24] Salima Saxton: Oh yeah.
I mean, I am obsessed with people saying no. Obviously, I've experienced it a lot having been an actor and as a writer. You know, it's one thing I believe in so strongly and obviously we've all listened to How To Fail, Elizabeth Day's brilliant podcast. But I gave a speech recently where I spoke about this and I said, failure, hearing the word no, are the building blocks of success. Nobody becomes successful by clicking their fingers and going, oh, it was just so jolly. I wrote a book and then it became a bestseller. Oh, it was just so wonderful. Now I had this massive business.
Anybody that I know doing anything, whichever field they are in, it is built with no, no, terrible, bad, uhoh, backwards, you know, it's all these painful, uncomfortable things, and it's about learning to become resilient and understandingwhy did they say no? Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Should I shift that? No, they're just wrong. Or okay, I should make that slightly different. It's about the plod.
I don't think it's terribly romantic becoming successful. It's just about turning up. We kind of glamorize success and people doing these kind of bold, extraordinary things. What's the reality of that? The reality is getting up really early, sitting in front of your laptop, having uncomfortable conversations, being brave, sweating as you go into the bank or whatever it is. It's uncomfortable and difficult and not terribly chic or glamorous. You know, it's not the Instagram reality of kind of hashtag girl boss.
[00:18:14] Patsy Day: We see the in shiny product and think that we have to start at that point. But that's the end point of after many iterative attempts.
[00:18:25] Susannah de Jager: I don't even think it's a point.
I agree with you on that because that's a shift that I've noticed in myself recently. Is that I was always looking for the end point. I was always thinking, if I just do this, just get here, just have this, then I will be Salima.
[00:18:43] Salima Saxton:
[00:18:43] Susannah de Jager: So with all of that, how did you come through that first pivot and stage and what was it? You've spoken about writing, but how did you take the next step? What did it look like for you?
[00:18:57] Salima Saxton: It felt uncomfortable. I had to let go of the intricate plats, and I was literally watching YouTube tutorials on how to create extraordinary plats for my girls. I think it was that point where I was like, okay, Salima. Get a grip. Let's get back to our brain a bit.
Look, in those early years, yeah, I was running to auditions. I did a few kind of guest spots on things.
I have been a self-starter always, right? I've never worked in a more traditional setup. But I still find it hard to sometimes not be shopping in the sales, zone out, pootle about a bit. God, I wasted so much time now I'm going to end up working in the evening. But what I have learned, I suppose, is that my hours are dictated by me. So I'm quite strict about how many words I get done each day. So sometimes I wasted loads of time. So the other day I work from 10:00 PM until 1:00 AM which was great. I got loads done.
Which might sound nightmarish to some people. But for me, I quite like that freedom. But I'm quite strict and actually I think a lot of people with multi hyphenate portfolio type careers, are very disciplined. We kind of think of often creative worlds of people being quite kind of vague and airy fairy but actually I'm very disciplined.More so I think than some friends who are in more traditional setups because I've got to get this done for myself. No one else is going to write this book. No one else is going to do all these things.
[00:20:27] Susannah de Jager:
[00:20:27] Patsy Day: Just to change tax slightly, how did your idea with your friend Jennifer come up about Women are Mad? What was the inception of that podcast?
[00:20:39] Salima Saxton: Jen, has been one of my best friends since I was 18. We met at Cambridge and we did a lot of, comedy at Cambridge together.
and Jen, became a freudian psychotherapist and she wrote a book about anger in women and we were talking about it and I said, do you know what? It would make a great podcast because I think it would be interesting to interview high profile women
in various fields and asking them how fury had impacted their lives, be it positive or negative. How anger had perhaps been a propulsive force at points in their life.
I like when you talk about how not being angry holds you back. The good girl, being polite, and how that conditioning, to be polite to nod and smile holds us back from leading, building, creating, and I think that's quite interesting. How are you expressing fury?
[00:21:36] Patsy Day: My little temper tantrums are quite domestic and I really hate the daily chores. They really, really break me.
[00:21:45] Salima Saxton: Me too. Doesn't break everyone, does it? But I'm similar. I always say like, I'm a great guest at a dinner party, but don't ask me to cook for you.
[00:21:53] Susannah de Jager: I have much more, I would say, endemic fury.
[00:21:58] Salima Saxton: But can you both say it out loud? That's what I'm interested in.
[00:22:01] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, and actually, I say it so often that my poor husband sometimes is like, that's true, and in the same sentence, how can you make it serve you? Because if you go out guns blazing out the front saying that. Actually you might harm your own cause. Work out a way to channel it that actually benefits you rather than subjugates you to that factor. Whatever it is you are railing against.
Sometimes railing against it more just makes it bigger in your life rather than smaller. I think it's great to look at anger, to acknowledge it, and then to say, how am I going to make it serve me.
[00:22:37] Salima Saxton: Could we use the word alchemize? How are we going to metabolize it into some more forward propulsive motion? And actually, when I started the podcast, I did say to Jen, obviously Jen, the huge, hilarious irony is that I never get angry. and she was like, oh God, yeah whatever. And what I learned very quickly is that, even into my forties, I have been swallowing anger. and anger obviously doesn't just dissipate and dissolve nicely.
For me, I think it probably became sadness and fear and things that kinda hung around in my belly. Whereas I'm getting better at expelling it and saying, oh no, I don't like that.
[00:23:21] Susannah de Jager: I don't know if this is a phrase that's out there, but I definitely think there's such a thing as parenting burnout, and it's not to do with a lack of love for your children, just to be clear. It's this sort of monotony of the tasks, and I'm one of five, and when I was pregnant with my first child, my mother quite reasonably turned around and said, I'm not going to be that granny just FYI.
I've just finished parenting. I do not have the appetite, the bandwidth, the depth left in it. And now she's coming back to it a bit and wants to be engaged on her terms. It's a big thing to put other people first for years and years and years and years and it has a cost and I think some of that cost is a sort of, you get to a point where you say vasta and now it's me.
And that presents as anger, but actually it's a reset as well, and I don't think it's often cast correctly. I think people should be allowed to say, and now it's okay for it to be entirely about you.
[00:24:13] Salima Saxton: Yes, and I would also add on top of that, for some it presents as anger, and for some it presents, I think like in my case, it presented as a real lack of confidence. It's kind of odd that I thought I couldn't write, even though all the evidence in my life thus far had pointed out to me that I was that person.
So. I think those early years of a lot of monotony, I mean, like I still can't eat a fish cake, eat hummus.
I will never, ever, ever go to a zoo. Ever again in my life. We lived really near London Zoo, so we used to go like three times a week.
[00:24:55] Susannah de Jager: You can still smell the lemurs, right?
[00:24:57] Salima Saxton: Yeah, exactly. But also there wasn't much breathing space. I feel like I was kind of breathing from my chest rather than taking like big diaphragmatic breaths of life at that point because I was meant to be jolly and like, yes.
We're just going to soft play, isn't it lovely?
[00:25:15] Patsy Day: Said no one ever.
[00:25:17] Salima Saxton: No, exactly. I'm just going to be jolly and it's all great. Now we're going to go to the singing class. Actually I wasn't always as happy as I made myself out to be, I think in those early years. But also, look, there's not always a choice, is it?
I had pushed to have three children. I wanted four children. I'd pushed to have this like big family. I was very aware. I was lucky to be with a supportive partner and everything was good. So I should be happy. But, you know, these shoulds that we say to ourselves, don't give us space.
And also too opposing things can be true at the same time, right? So we can go, gosh, yeah, I'm very privileged. I'm really lucky. My children are healthy, they're great, my kids, this is amazing. But you can also at the same time go, oh my God, that was mind numbingly hellish that day, and I really want to be by myself desperately. But equally, you wouldn't swap it for the world.
So I surround myself purposefully these days with women, with close female friends who can say it all and who can understand you can have two utterly opposing thoughts at the same time. Particularly for those of us who grew up with quite complicated upbringings. I didn't have a kind of blueprint, particularly from my father. So I've been kind of like working out, as has my husband. We don't come from families where there was any kind of blueprint, emotional or financial. So I'm quite proud that we've managed to improvise it thus far.
[00:27:01] Susannah de Jager: I think that's a shared experience for lots of people in different guises. Because the reality of marrying up, even just if they were quite well functioning, two completely different backgrounds is such a difficult thing, and
you are pulling on different memories of what your parents did, of what was normal for you that you didn't even realize you had. It's like a muscle memory.
[00:27:24] Salima Saxton: Yes, it is totally that and also I thought having children would release me effortlessly. I would kind of ride off over a rainbow with my children. But actually what happened is that I became all too aware of what my father wasn't because of what my own love was for my children, and it really hurt me quite painfully at that point.
It really struck me, oh God, he still wasn't able to X, Y, and Z. Even though I was his child.
So those were all my really early thoughtswhen they were very young, and actually, I estranged myself from my father when my youngest was two. Not a decision that was taken overnight.
It was a very, complicated, big decision.I just want to make that really clear. I don't know if I would've ever have made that decision had I not had children. It was very entwined with having children. So he died, 18 months ago and it's weird in the last year it's been quite a release for me, his death, actually, I feel much lighter.
[00:28:33] Patsy Day: I think people who are estranged from their parents are quite often told that they should make up with them.
[00:28:44] Salima Saxton: Yes.
[00:28:46] Patsy Day: I think also when addiction plays a part of it, when somebody was never really able to be your parent when somebody may have said, very violent, may have acted very violently. When a parent has behaved in unfathomable ways, which you find all the more shocking when you become a parent yourself, there comes a point where the only thing that was holding me back anyway was, but what happens when he dies?
[00:29:21] Salima Saxton: And I thought, with the help of a therapist, actually, I can't continue a relationship with somebody who makes me feel so awful all the time, just because at some point he will die
[00:29:39] Patsy Day: It also ties in with your rejection of the having to be the good girl.
[00:29:44] Salima Saxton: Utterly, utterly that, and actually. He did me a great favor after he died. He left explicit instructions that I not attend his funeral, which at the time was really shocking to me when I first heard it. But that's actually really helped me with my grief, the grief for the father that I never had. The grief for the father that I did have as well, because I really saw in that moment that decision that he'd made, that this was not a man who could be close to me and my most beloved people, my children, and I'd called it right for me.
So somebody asked me recently, do you have regrets that you didn't see him in these last few months? And I don't know what this makes me or how this makes me sound, and I kind of don't really care how it makes me sound, actually. I don't have any regrets. I said goodbye to him in my own way many years ago, eight years ago, and it was incredibly painful to come to that decision. But I felt I was being held ransom because he was my father, and so I must continue a relationship with him. But he was somebody who pulled me apart. Was a lot to do with my lack of confidence actually in my early years anyway.
I can now say, yes, I loved my father. Did I love my father? Yeah. I loved my father. I've still got memories of him, painting pictures with him, listening to Stan Getz. There are some early good memories that have surfaced in the last few months. But did I like my father? No, I didn't like my father.
[00:31:41] Patsy Day: You know, when you said, what does it make me, I don't think it makes you anything. It just is what it is.
[00:31:45] Salima Saxton:
[00:31:45] Susannah de Jager: This has been amazing, Salima. You've been so open and I've really loved speaking to you. We have one question we always ask. I'd sort of been answered, but I'll ask it nonetheless, which is, what would you tell your 30-year-old self now if you had her in a room on a podcast with you?
[00:32:08] Salima Saxton: I say leap. As simple as that. Even if you don't know what the landing's going to be. That's the advice I would give to almost anybody, at any stage in their life, about anything. If you feel compelled, or interested, or passionate, or that your people are there and that's for you.
Leap, nothing is guaranteed in this life. Leap, leap, leap.
[00:32:30] Patsy Day: Salima, thank you so much.
[00:32:33] Salima Saxton: Pleasure.
[00:32:34] Susannah de Jager: Thank you for listening to Season Two of the Wobbly Middle. We've so enjoyed these conversations and we hope you have too. That's all for now until after the summer. But if you've got any stories for us, please reach out on our social channels, LinkedIn, Substack, Instagram @thewobblymiddle. Thank you.